1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to business rules and, more particularly, to systems and methods for automatic detection and processing of instances of business rules.
2. Description of the Background Art
The automatic evaluation and processing of business rules is more and more becoming a very important capability of business software products across industries. The manual processing of such rules can be very time and cost consuming.
It is crucial for any business that rules be created as easy as possible. For example, it is important that rules are capable of being formulated in a business language, without having to learn a special programming syntax. A clerk that creates and maintains rules should only need to be concerned with the definition of the rule itself and not with extraneous information such as for which and for how many entities his or her rule could potentially be evaluated in case it is triggered.
For example, assume a clerk creates a rule for financing contracts that says:                “If a payer for a leasing contract item has a scoring value less than B, and there are more than 3 billing items open, start dunning the Sold-To.”        
The business context could be that this rule is started for a bundle contract that contains more than one leasing contract item. Furthermore, there might be more than one payer per leasing contract item.
The clerk should not have to be concerned with creating a rule that covers all instances to account for multiple leasing contract items and/or multiple payers, etc. For example, the above rule could also be created as follows to account for multiple leasing contract items and/or multiple payers:                Loop at the leasing contract items in the bundle contract                    Loop at the payers for the individual leasing contract item                            Check the following rule per individual leasing contract and per payer in this contract                “If the payer for the leasing contract item has a scoring value less than B, and there are more than 3 billing items open, start dunning the Sold-To.”                                                
The application itself should hide this complexity by determining and processing the right instances of entities in the context given when the rule is started.